Migrant crisis forces European countries to enforce desperate measures

In Macedonia, more teams of volunteers from the United Nations and government special police forces guide them onto buses or onto rundown electric trains or cramped taxis headed for the country’s northern border with Serbia.

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka insisted his country would never accept compulsory quotas, saying the system “won’t work”, while Slovakia said it would try to block any such binding measures.

Austria said it would deploy the army to help control the influx of people trying to leave Hungary before it starts arresting illegal migrants on Tuesday, while huge queues of traffic built up on the Germany-Austria border as the checks kicked in.

The efforts created significant pressure points as the flow of people fleeing violence at home and trekking through the Balkans showed no sign of abating.

Europe is struggling to cope with an enormous influx of people, mostly from Syria, who are fleeing violence and poverty in their own countries.

European Union members were on collision course on Monday over proposals to distribute asylum-seekers across the continent, a plan backed by safe-haven Germany but resisted by several ex-Communist states in the east.

The church leaders said they welcomed attempts by the European Commission to impose mandatory quotas of refugees on member states so that burden was shared equally among them.

Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto said the Austrian chancellor had been pursuing a “campaign of lies” against Hungary for weeks that made it harder to find a common European solution to the crisis. “That will become a domino effect and then we can forget Schengen” – the open-border policy generally considered one of the greatest achievements of the EU.

The worldwide Organization for Migration has said that more than 430,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe this year, with 2,748 dying en route or going missing. “They’ll enable us to at least slow down the acute inflows of refugees“.

On September 3, migrants boarded a train in Budapest in the belief that they were heading to the border with Austria but the train was stopped 35 km (22 miles) west of the capital in the town of Bicske, where Hungary has a camp for asylum seekers.

Austria’s chancellor however slammed its neighbour, comparing Orban’s treatment of migrants to Nazi-era cruelty.

“You have to defend Hungary and Europe”. “It’s time to speak out against the deadly borders that have been enacted in our name”.

The talks in Brussels focused on the objections of at least four Eastern European nations who refused to be forced to take in any more people.

On Saturday, the count reached 12,200 and many were forced to spend the night in the open.

A draft agreement would also include strong language on the need for tighter controls of the bloc’s external borders, rapid screening of arrivals and deportation of those without valid asylum claims, to help assuage countries concerned that relocating asylum seekers could attract more people.

Greece is simply overwhelmed by the numbers of people coming across the sea from Turkey and can not properly screen the migrants, let alone house them.

But the rules still bar undocumented migrants from travel within the zone, while leaving few mechanisms to stop them.

Luxembourg Finance Minister Pierre Gramegna said Friday the EU’s executive Commission will “analyze whether the refugee crisis can be considered an extraordinary circumstance” under rules the bloc has to ensure sound public finances.

The draft conclusions for the European Union meeting noted the German action, as well as assurances from Berlin that the border checks were a temporary measure responding to a crisis on its frontier.